Hinds: I’m well into arc two, so I’m on [issue] eight right now. We’re definitely pretty far a long. I’m obviously, as the writer, ahead of the art. But even Denys is just way ahead, I was looking at the pencils of number four today and I just got so excited because it just looked so freaking awesome.
Shock: Best case scenario, what do you see the longevity of Voodoo Child being?
Hinds: Well, in my perfect world I’d love to be looking at my bookshelf one day and seeing 10 perfectly bound volumes. I just think that’s a nice number, but that’s completely up to both the readers and Vertigo. Also, I think as a writer, stories tell themselves. I already know what the ending of this saga is. I hope I can be as honest enough in this ending as in this beginning. I hope I have the opportunity to end it in the way that I want to. Now I don’t see this ending tomorrow, but there’s a complete story, a complete tale that I want to tell. Hopefully we’ll have for me to get it out.
Shock: There’s an end game planned?
Hinds: Well, for me. I don’t know about anybody else. Even before I wrote the first panel I knew what the last panel was. I know how this ends, but I think you have to leave yourself some room with the artist to be surprised a bit, that’s kind of a tricky balance. You also have to relax enough for the characters to tell you where they want to go and what they want to do. It sounds like this strange hippie trippy thing, but it’s actually true it does happen that way. You get so invested in these people, so in to certain characters heads. Sometimes when I write I don’t necessarily write it sequentially. I’ll write a certain character’s arc throughout an issue, so I’m in that person’s voice for 20 pages. Then you shake it out of your head and then you’re this character for the whole issue. You do get to the point where you think you have a plan, or an idea, but the character really ends up dictating where you want to go. So, I have my general sense of how I think this ends, and I think that will stay true, but I’m also open to how this story unfolds and reveals itself as we go forward.
Shock: How far into your conception of what the comic is and what it would become did you realize that you had the ending?
Hinds: I would say maybe about halfway through. There were several stages of research, first it was just the research of New Orleans the city in its real sense. The actual history of the place, political history, crime history. Then there was a lot of the legends, the myths and the fables that have sprung up around the city as well. Then the third and probably the biggest one for me was researching the voodoo. Which is really, of all the mythology based tropes in pop culture, it’s been both really under utilized and over simplified. For most people it’s this really dark thing that involves people sticking needles into dolls and it’s so not that. It’s the reason this series fits in so perfectly at Vertigo. Even issue one probably doesnt suggest how much its going to go into this terrain. It’s a very classic Vertigo book in terms of Sandman and Lucifer that are populated by these characters that come out of this divine pantheon. There’s only a little bit of that in issue one but there’s going to be a lot of gods and demigods walking around Voodoo Child. To what that means in terms of the story, the characters and how it plays out, it was really interesting stuff. So for me, since there’s not a ton of literature, a lot of it was just old school journalism go talk to people type of research. I think it was during that third big phase of research it occurred to me what a possible ending to this grand epic could be.
Hinds: Nothing officially planned from Vertigo, obviously we’re just getting started. But if I had my druthers then sure. Hopefully that’ll happen. The one thing we’re kind of doing is ending each arc, they’ve been doing this with other books in general. But the last story in the trade is something non-sequential in the actually arc. Maybe focus on a different character, era or moment. I’ve been using that opportunity to think about solo, single shot issues that aren’t necessarily driven by the main character but are still located within the world of the story. If something like that gets a response and people want to see more of it, let Vertigo know and we’ll go from there.
Shock: You touched on it earlier, but how much research about voodoo beliefs an tradition did you go into when you were writing it or just how much of it is products of your imagination?
Hinds: It’s a combination of both. I probably read everything that is to read. Without getting too much into it, I found my way to people who were practitioners and are knowledgeable about it. I did a lot of interviews of that kind of thing. But youre exactly right in the second half of your question, the main purpose of all that research for me is there’s a basic rule for every discipline that you’ve got to know what the rules are before you break them. My research was to arm me with understanding, what the scope and the range of this mythology really is. Now I always knew that once I knew that I was then going to take a pretty significant creative leap at that point forward. Especially because it’s one thing to do something with say the Olympians or the Christian pantheon because we have all these bodies of literature, tales, anecdotes, and fables that have been written over a hundred years about those characters. You don’t have to think to hard to say I’m going to write an anecdotal thing about Satan or I’m going to write something about Zeus or Thor. There’s a body of literature around them. On the other hand if you’re like I’m going to write something about Baron Samedi or a Baroness, you’ve got to make it up. There really isnt that much there. On the one hand it was important to me to understand where this thing comes from, what drives it, what the real particulars are so that I can then move into a creative space where I’m telling stories about these characters.
Shock: What were you biggest influences when you were working on the book?
Hinds: They were pretty varied. I kind of go into a vacuum once I actually start working on a project. I’ll read and look at a lot of stuff before hand. So leading up to it I was doing everything from, I think I went back and reread most of the Vertigo catalog. So anything that had vaguely to do with narrative based on pantheons. I went back and read a lot of Vertigo Crime stuff. Other books as well, because one of the key things about the story is I didn’t want to write something that was completely located in the fantastical. Because of the city and the time period that we’re dealing with. So as you can already get some sense of from the first issue, yeah there’s going to be gods, demons and other crazy stuff in this book but there’s also going to be crooks, people getting shot, crooked politicians. You know, really gritty The Wire-type of stuff basically. It’s that kind of combination of supernatural and gritty real that I think makes it different for me. Having said that I read everything of that nature that Vertigo had. I went back and watched the first three seasons of The Wire. I think I looked at season one of Treme. I do a lot of stuff that is more about getting a vibe as opposed to looking for specific ideas. For instance, I also happen to be a DJ as well, so before I started writing I probably spent a month just putting together every New Orleans based music that I could get my hands on. Just buying a bunch of New Orleans records. Everything from newer stuff to really old King Oliver jazz. I just sort of soaked myself in the city from that perspective, did that for a couple of weeks then you just shake it off and start writing. The influences speak to you in what ever way they end up speaking to you.
Shock: Did you go down to New Orleans during this process?
Shock: Have you got anything else going on besides the comic or anything else in the pipeline that you can tease for us?
Hinds: Yeah, unfortunately I’m not allowed to say, which kind of sucks. But I can say there’s going to be a cool announcement on a graphic novel project pretty soon. There’s also going to be some stuff thats going to come out soon that I’m doing on the film side as well. But for now my full focus, time and energy is on Dominique and Voodoo Child.
Shock: Thanks a lot for taking the time to do this interview with us.
Hinds: No man, thank you. Like I said I was a journalist for a long time, so I like to put myself on the other side of the phone as much as possible.
Follow Spencer on Twitter: @ScarySpencer.
